CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

An hour later, Jessie stared at Julian Crest across the interrogation table at Central Station, trying to hide her frustration.

Despite his demand that Carla the receptionist call his lawyer or his mother, the man hadn't invoked his right to remain silent after he had his rights read to him. In fact, he'd been as combative as ever once they started questioning him. And yet, Jessie didn't feel any closer to solving this case than before.

She understood now why Beth had stopped subscribing to the guy's YouTube channel. Despite his good looks and his intermittent ability to charm, Julian Crest was an egotistical blowhard who couldn't be counted on to speak coherently for any extended period of time. He was a himbo with anger management issues who had been coasting on his dazzling face and body for years.

In fact, midway through their interrogation, they'd received a text from Jamil which showed that Crest's business had been set up by his mother, a CPA who was apparently very involved in his life. That made sense to Jessie, as she couldn't imagine Crest running a lemonade stand, much less a multi-million-dollar business.

Of course, that gave her pause on another front. If this guy was as thick-headed as he seemed to be, could he really have murdered two women without leaving any trace? That's what she intended to get at now.

"Julian," she said. "We've been going around in circles here. You keep saying you're an innocent man being railroaded, but you're not offering us anything to support what you say."

"Because this a corrupt investigation," he bellowed before pointing at Ryan, who was standing against the far wall of the room with an incredulous look on his face. "You and your beefcake buddy there are like, the enemy of the peop—."

"Julian," Jessie interrupted, holding up her hand, "I want you to focus on the question that I'm asking you, not the one you want to answer. If you're innocent, then you shouldn't have a problem with that."

"Unless you're trying to entrap me! "

"Even if I was," she told him, "that won't work if the evidence doesn't support it. Now, after we found Isabella Moreno's body—."

"I still think that photo of her you showed me could have been a deep fake," he protested.

Crest was referring to when they initially confronted him with Moreno's murder and how he had refused to accept it. At the time, Jessie couldn't tell if that was an act to throw off suspicion or a legitimate refusal to accept the truth. Her additional questions had her leaning toward the latter.

"Julian, the police don't create deep fake photos of dead bodies to trick suspects," she said. "Please stay focused."

"That's exactly what you would say if you were trying to entrap me," he said as if he'd made some unassailably logical argument.

Jessie chose to ignore the comment, sensing it would just send them back down the rabbit hole. "A strand of your hair was found on Isabella's body. Can you explain that?"

Crest looked at her with a mix of apprehension and pride.

"How do I know I can trust you with my answer?"

"I'm not even sure what that means, Julian," she said. "All I can tell you is that if you have an explanation for your hair being on her body that doesn't involve you killing her, it would be smart to share that now. Otherwise, we have to assume the worst."

Crest dramatically ran his hand through the hair at issue, as if that might help him make his decision.

"Okay, listen," he whispered, apparently thinking that the microphones in the interrogation room wouldn't pick up his words, "sometimes Izzie and I would bang. You know, not a relationship or anything, just two people having a good time every now and then."

"Okay," Jessie said, happy to be making any forward progress, "did you and Izzie ‘bang' this morning?"

"No," he said, "but we did last night. I stopped by her place for a little while. She was nervous about some presentation she had today and said she needed a stress reliever."

"Where in her home did you help relieve her stress?" Jessie pressed.

"That time it was in the bed, although we would knock boots all over—in her car, once even on the kitchen counter," he said, smiling at the memory, before another thought popped into his head. "Hey, maybe my hair got on her because it was still in her bed or her car or something. That can happen, right? "

"Sometimes," Jessie conceded, deflated. "So you were with Izzie last night. Do you remember what time?"

"Yeah, she asked me to come over early because she wanted to get a good night's sleep, so I showed up at her place in Santa Monica at 8:30."

"Do you remember when you left?" Jessie asked.

"Not exactly," he said, "but I wasn't there that long, maybe twenty minutes. I remember she made me a sandwich for the road."

Jessie glanced over at Ryan and could read his mind from his expression. He was doing the same math that she was. If Crest was being honest, there was no way he could have made it from Santa Monica around 8:50 to the Hancock Park art gallery where Chloe Baptiste was killed by 9 p.m.

"What about today at around 11:15?" she asked. "Where were you then?"

"Can I check my phone?" he asked.

She nodded and slid it over to him.

"Oh yeah," he said after clicking to his calendar. "I was at a meeting. My mom set up this photo calendar shoot and we were going over what I would wear for each month. It lasted from eleven to just before noon."

"Where was the meeting?" Jessie asked, doing her best not to reveal how, with each word he said, she saw the case against him slipping away.

"Over the hill, in Burbank," he answered before asking a question of his own. "Is that when she was killed, at 11:15, because there was no way I could be there at that time."

"Good to know," Jessie said, standing up. "Julian, I'm going to leave you with Detective Hernandez here. He's going to ask you to provide some names, numbers, and cell phone data. If it backs up what you've told me, then we may be able to let you go."

"For real?" he asked, a delighted smile on his face.

"For real," she told him before leaning over and murmuring in Ryan's ear. "I'm sorry but I can't take another minute of this. While we've been wasting time with this numbskull, there's someone out there slaughtering women. I need a few moments."

She didn't even wait for his response. As he took over her seat and asked Julian for the names of the people in the photo calendar meeting, she stepped out of the interrogation room. Once she was in the hallway, she headed straight for the courtyard square in the center of the station. It was often her respite from the horrors of these cases, a place where she could take a mental break.

In this instance, she wondered if it could do more. But it probably wasn't realistic to ask a plot of green space in the middle of a concrete, downtown fortress to help her shake off the feeling of approaching doom that was enveloping her like a heavy cloak. No amount of pretty trees could do that. Only catching this bastard would.